Joel Connelly: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Peggy Maze Johnson, who directed the Neighbors in Need program during Seattle’s “Boeing Recession” of the early 1970’s, has taken a top political job in the Western state with the earliest voice in choosing the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee.

Johnson was named last weekend as Executive Director of the Clark County (Las Vegas), Nevada, Democratic Party.

Johnson has been working on the campaign of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in preparation for Nevada’s second-in-the-nation, January 19th precinct caucuses.

A Catholic laywoman from Capitol Hill, the then-Peggy Maze was the face and often-loud voice of the volunteer program that fed thousands of suddenly unemployed middle class Seattleites at a time when Boeing’s employment fell from 101,000 to fewer than 35,000.

Success of the Seattle program injected her into one of the 20th Century’s most bizarre kidnappings.

When newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974, her Symbionese Liberation Army captors demanded a feeding program for the Bay Area poor. Maze and Washington’s then-Secretary of State A. Ludlow Kramer were called upon to organize it from scratch in a few days.

She later worked in the 1978 campaign that put Mike Lowry in Congress, and conducted community organizing and political training for the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees.

A Las Vegas resident since 2001, Johnson has headed a group called Citizen Alert, which mobilized opposition to location of a nuclear waste dump at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.